Month: October 2018

You might not realize it, but every time you stand up, your body is working behind the scenes to stop you from fainting. Due to the sudden drop in blood pressure, special neurons called baroreceptors swing into action to compensate – and scientists just figured out more about how they operate. Considering the details of

When experiments are run at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator, it’s a tremendous event. The world’s largest machine has been responsible for discovering numerous new subatomic particles, including the ultra-elusive Higgs boson. And lately, its data has been hinting tantalisingly at new physics beyond the Standard Model – the best set of equations we

We often think of space as peaceful and serene. In reality it’s filled with violent events, including collisions on the galactic scale. We know our own Milky Way has likely smashed up with other galaxies in the distant past; now astronomers have revealed that one particular collision resulted in a mysterious feature called the ‘thick

Millions of people around the world are affected by arachnophobia – the unreasonable fear of spiders, which evidence suggests could be an innate human response embedded by evolution inside the brain. But while the fear may be a relic of an ancient survival mechanism, the anxiety it provokes is something most arachnophobes today would rather

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has released its latest summary of the state of Earth’s biosphere. You don’t need depressing headlines to tell you it isn’t full of good news. Between 1970 and 2014, populations of vertebrate animals declined by an average of 60 percent. Freshwater animals have it even worse, with drops

Rolling back a decades-old ban, the Chinese government will permit the use of rhino horn and tiger bone for use in traditional Chinese medicine, in a move that conservation groups warned could devastate the dwindling species. China’s State Council said Monday it would legalize the trade of rhino and tiger parts sourced from farmed animals,

NASA announced Tuesday that Kepler, an orbital telescope that’s been spotting and analyzing distant planets for the past nine years, has run out of fuel and will no longer carry out scientific research. Since it launched in March 2009, the telescope identified over 2,600 planets outside of our solar system, and found that as much

According to a new study, the energy costs of mining Bitcoin alone could cause a 2-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures within 20 years. Bitcoin might be promising a brave new world of financial freedom, but it’s also responsible for a huge spike in electricity use, so the new study has attempted to put a number

At its peak, the ancient city of Teotihuacán in what we now know as Mexico boasted an estimated 125,000 inhabitants, making it one of the busiest hubs of the old world. Nobody knows for sure where that thriving populace disappeared to, but the discovery of a secret tunnel and chamber buried beneath the city’s Pyramid

Disney has something of a cult following, so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that some people want to stay in the entertainment giant’s theme parks… forever. As a report in the Wall Street Journal has just confirmed, some people really try to do that – by having loved ones scatter their cremains. At

The Best Illusions of the Year competition is nothing to sneeze at – every year a group of experts (along with internet users) vote for the most interesting and mind-melting illusions, submitted from all over the world. And this year is no exception; we have everything from trippy snakes to a three-way ambiguous object. Let’s

In the waters off the coast of California, marine scientists are finding a whole world of cephalopod wonders: in the latest instalment, it’s a vast number of octopuses huddling over their eggs in the crevices of an extinct underwater volcano. With an estimated over 1,000 ockies spotted, the area at the Davidson Seamount has now

A few years ago, the journal Small published a study showing how photosynthetic bacteria could absorb and release photons as the light bounced across a minuscule gap between two mirrors. Now, a retroactive look at the study’s data published in The Journal of Physics Communications suggests something more may have been going on. The bacteria

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has just made history by making the closest ever approach to the Sun by a human-made object. On 29 October 2018, at 1:04 pm EDT (17:04 UTC), it crossed the previous, decades-old record of 42.73 million kilometres (26.55 million miles) from the Sun’s surface. “It’s been just 78 days since Parker

New research into a very weird type of ice known as Ice VII has revealed how it can form at speeds over 1,000 miles per hour (1,610 kilometres per hour), and how it might be able to spread across yet-to-be-explored alien worlds. This ice type was only discovered occurring naturally in March, trapped inside diamonds

Chocolate is not a new thing. The delicious, addictive treat we know today has long been traced to the ancient peoples of Central America, as far back as 4,000 years ago. But new research indicates chocolate’s origin story is actually far, far older than this – and suggests it was domesticated somewhere else entirely, south

Deep in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of California, marine scientists have been lucky enough to capture a rare and wonderful sight: a sweet Dumbo octopus going about its business. They’re absolutely adorable, but unfortunately we don’t tend to spot Dumbo octopuses (Grimpoteuthis) often; they live deep below the surface of

Nearly 200,000 light-years from Earth, the Small Magellanic Cloud is dying. Slowly, over vast time, the galaxy is losing its ability to form new stars – eventually to fade into a wisp of intergalactic gas. And, thanks to the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), astronomers have borne witness to this demise in the finest

For decades the existence of weird space clouds in Earth’s orbit has been speculative and controversial, but new research looks to validate their strange reality after all. The Kordylewski clouds – two mysterious swarms of dust trapped between the competing gravitational fields of Earth and the Moon – were first hypothesised back in the 1950s,

Deep in the enormous citadel of an ancient Peruvian culture, archaeologists have uncovered a corridor containing 19 mysterious black wooden statues. Some are wearing masks of clay, tucked into special alcoves that line the walls. The eerie line-up was discovered in the ruins of the great Chimú culture capital city of Chan Chan, which is

NASA scientist Jeremy Harbeck was on a surveying flight over the Antarctic Peninsula earlier this month when he spotted an iceberg that looked like no other. It was almost perfectly rectangular, with square sides and a flat top that made it look more human-made than natural. “I thought this rectangular iceberg was visually interesting and

Looking up at space reminds us that everyone and everything on Earth is stuck together on a big space rock that’s drifting through an infinite black void. Unfortunately, terrestrial concerns like work, dinner, and getting enough sleep tend to keep us facing down. Thankfully, some people not only take the time to appreciate the night

This Halloween, the creepiest event to attend might be a mass online social experiment hosted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT is famous for churning out some of the world’s top engineers, programmers, and scientists. But the university’s Media Laboratory is increasingly known for launching experimental projects in October that are designed

For years, a mystery puzzled environmental scientists. The world had banned the use of many ozone-depleting compounds in 2010. So why were global emission levels still so high? The picture started to clear up in June. That’s when The New York Times published an investigation into the issue. China, the paper claimed, was to blame for these mystery emissions. Now it turns

An awful lot can happen in any given week, and it’s no easy task keeping up with all the excitement – both in the world of science and beyond. To keep you up to date with our coverage at ScienceAlert, each week we put together this shareable image with some of the past week’s highlights.

Sphen wanted to show Magic how much he meant to him. The male gentoo penguin grasped a wet, heart-shaped stone in his beak, waddled to Magic’s nest and plopped it down to buttress their nest. It is a sign of courtship, experts have said, but also practicality. Magic needed to stay huddled over their egg, using rocks to

Forests are often dubbed the lung’s of the Earth. But as beautiful as that metaphor is, trees don’t actually breathe in the common sense of the word – or do they? A creepy new video has captured a dense forest in Quebec rising and falling as if a giant monster were snoring under its mossy

On February 11th, 2016, scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) made history when they announced the first detection of gravitational waves. Originally predicted made by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity a century prior, these waves are essentially ripples in space-time that are formed by major astronomical events – such as the merger of

Humans have got a lot to answer for when it comes to interfering with nature. And we can add noisy cargo ships to the rather shameful list of ways we’re affecting the lives of the animals we share the planet with. A new study reveals low-frequency hums from this maritime traffic are causing whales to

What would convince you that aliens existed? The question came up recently at a conference on astrobiology, held at Stanford University in California. Several ideas were tossed around – unusual gases in a planet’s atmosphere, strange heat gradients on its surface. But none felt persuasive. Finally, one scientist offered the solution: a photograph. There was

Mars is a sizable planet about nine times the mass of our moon. The latest scientific research suggests Mars, despite looking like a giant desert, may harbour enough subsurface water and warmth to support microbial life today. But against the deep, dark backdrop of space, the rusty-red world looks as humble and insignificant as Earth. NASA underscored this stark reality with

The next time you pee, think about this: Your urine could one day create the sustainable building materials of the future. Dyllon Randall is a research engineer at the University of Cape Town. He’s also the supervisor on a new project in which students harvested urine from urinals so they could transform the waste into

The entire time the Moon has been sitting up there, quietly orbiting Earth, it turns out it’s actually been doing something incredible. Something that could help teach us about the early Universe. Off its rocky surface, the Moon reflects radio waves emitted by our home galaxy, the Milky Way. And now astronomers have detected them.

During my time as a zookeeper I had the privilege of working with both Sumatran and Amur tigers. If they did not both have stripes, you would think they were different species altogether. The Sumatran tiger is the smallest alive today. At around 100 kilograms (220 pounds), it’s “only” about the weight of a large adult

The US Geological Survey (USGS) has recently updated their assessment of potentially threatening volcanoes across the nation, making changes in light of more than a decade of fresh research. First, the good news: all of that data has revealed a handful of volcanoes with minimal threat of causing wanton destruction can now be crossed off

Strange-looking black pouches have been washing up on beaches along North Carolina’s shores. But despite how they might look, they’re not plastic pollution, as officials have reminded the well-meaning public. That’s because they’re actually something much cooler – the egg casings of sea skates. Sometimes known as mermaid’s or devil’s purses, based on their weird

Scientists at the Kaloko-Honokohau National Historical Park are doing some great work. They’re looking after the park on Hawaii’s Big Island, and showing off the little critters they find on their Facebook page along the way. But back in August, while the park’s marine biologists were conducting coral reef monitoring, they found a doozy –

Perhaps one of the world’s best known fossils is Archaeopteryx. With its beautifully preserved feathers, it has long been regarded as the first bird in the fossil record, and is often called “the icon of evolution“. Only a handful of specimens have ever been found, its elusivity adding to its fascination. But was it really

High over the peak of a long dead volcano on the Martian equator, a feathery white cloud stretches across the sky. At first glance it looks like the plume of an eruption, but Mars is a world with a cold, dead heart. It has been for some time. So what’s going on? Researchers think they

NASA scientists have captured images of an iceberg in Antarctica that looks perfectly rectangular. The photos were taken as part of Operation IceBridge, an ongoing NASA mission to document changes in polar ice. During a flight over the northern Antarctic Peninsula on October 16, scientists captured images of the rectangular iceberg while gathering information on

There’s something out there, watching us from the night sky. We can’t see it, but it can see us. European Southern Observatory (EOS) has recently released a new and eerie view of the active star-forming region NGC 2467, ominously known as the Skull and Crossbones Nebula. The image is both beautiful and sinister. Bound by the whims

As beautiful and unspoilt as the Antarctic wilderness is, it can also be very lonely (unless you’re a penguin). After news of a researcher at the Bellingshausen Station on King George Island allegedly stabbing and injuring a colleague, we wonder if cabin fever got the better of the team working there. The injured man was flown

Well, we didn’t think it was possible, but we should have had more faith in our feathered corvid friends: crows just got even cooler. Researchers have discovered that crows don’t just use single objects as tools; they can also make them out of multiple parts that are individually useless. Let that sink in for a

Deep inside the diffuse haze of gas and dust that surround the smallest galaxies, dark matter could be clumping into cold droplets called ‘Bose stars’. Of course, we don’t even know what the mysterious dark matter is, let alone have evidence of invisible ‘stars’. But if current assumptions pan out, a new mathematical model suggests

The beast of an earthquake that rattled Mexico in September of last year has turned out to be even more unusual than we knew. Not only did it hit magnitude 8.2 and produce strange lights in the sky, seismologists have now revealed it also cracked a tectonic plate all the way through. “If you think

On Monday, President Trump tweeted out a map, exclaiming that American air is the best air by far. That’s not exactly true. The map, grabbed from a World Health Organisation report out earlier this year, is an estimate of how much ultra-fine particulate matter (PM) people are breathing in around the world. This kind of

For as long as Buttermilk Creek has wound its way through Texas Hill Country, its spring-fed waters have carved through the region’s dark, dense clays, cutting away layers of earth to expose the rock – and the history – below. Here, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of a human settlement stretching back as far as 15,500

Ending a romantic relationship is never easy, and there’s something about a bad relationship that makes it especially hard to break off. Researchers are still not entirely sure what that “something” is, but a new study suggests it may be a curious sign of altruism. You might assume people who stay in an unhappy relationship are